The details of her history are sketchy: an Army brat who moved around the South and Midwest with her parents and younger brother, Keester spent her high-school years in Nashua, New Hampshire. In 1999, two years after graduating from Babson College with an accounting degree, Keester claims to have suffered a stroke after taking a birth-control pill, which impacted her ability to think clearly and left her with a slight limp in her left leg. (The Phoenix has not been able to authenticate that claim.) Shortly after, she moved to Boston and, according to the Suffolk district attorney’s office, hit “every temp agency” in the metro area with a near-fictional résumé and fake references. Thanks to the privileged nature of the jobs she then landed, between 2001 and 2006, she gained access to the financial records of close to 40 metro companies. Keester’s résumé says that she graduated with honors, but her college transcripts tell a different story — a cumulative GPA of 2.0, with a 1.17 her senior year. The businesses she worked for said she couldn’t do the simplest accounting procedures, but the jobs gave her open access to employee and client addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, incomes, and other personal information.

While in the Boston area, Keester, whose middle name is Michelle, wreaked havoc on the lives of co-workers, landlords, neighbors, acquaintances, and people she embezzled from over the Internet. Whether swindling a Chicago business-school student searching Craigslist for a Cambridge sublet or applying for fraudulent student loans, she drafted letters, impersonated her own references, and doctored documents to dupe her victims.

From 2000 to 2003, she sought employment while receiving $1324.71 per month in disability payments. When the Social Security Administration questioned her, Keester claimed that she had been the victim of identity theft: that she was not able to work and deserved the payments, and that someone must have gotten her driver’s license when she threw it away (the stroke having claimed her ability to drive). The thief, she said, must be working under her Social Security number.

While Keester lived among her victims in Beacon Hill, she was brazen in her schemes, stealing neighbors’ checks out of her buildings’ common mailboxes and falsifying bank documents to make it seem as if she had paid rent. By the time Keester accepted her plea bargain in December 2006, the Suffolk district attorney’s Special Prosecutions Unit named her the city’s most prolific identity thief.

‘A simple, honest person’
Keester’s case file, which resides in the Suffolk district attorney’s office, is larger than most murder files. Sending out more than 70 related subpoenas, recalls Durette, the district attorney’s team “literally could not keep up with her until her arrest.”

The Special Investigations Unit — composed of Durette, Helsel, and Boston Police officer Steven Blair — eventually tracked her down, but its members seem to maintain a soft spot for Keester, a woman who gave an alluringly fragile performance as a tragic hero, even after her capture.

Of all the cases to land on her desk, remembers Helsel, Keester is “definitely the most interesting.” Helsel is still astounded by Keester’s criminal productivity. “I know there are victims out there that we never found,” she says, with what sounds like a bit of admiration.

Library woes In an attempt to save four Boston Public Library branches that are slated to close due to budget shortfalls, some state legislators from Boston have threatened to block all state funding the library receives if it shutters any of its 26 branches.

Mayor-Select Marie? Tom Menino, just a few months into an unprecedented fifth term as Boston’s mayor, has raised eyebrows by hiring State Representative Marie St. Fleur of Dorchester to the newly created, $120,000-a-year position of chief of advocacy and strategic investment.

Tyme fer moore lernin’ Much sport has been made of the hilariously misspelled signs created and proudly displayed at rallies by barely literate Tea Partiers.

Brown-nosing and flip-flopping Two months ago, when Senator Scott Brown crossed party lines to help pass a jobs bill, the Phoenix noted the political convenience of that supposed show of independence — since other Republican senators were also voting with Democrats, Brown’s vote was unnecessary.

Are doctors complicit in prison torture? In the past few years an outcry has arisen over the involvement of military and CIA medical professionals and psychologists in torture. Some critics have even suggested criminal prosecution of the medical staff involved or, at least, revocation of their professional licenses.

Springtime for Militia I’m scrubbing my armpits in the campground bathroom at Fort Hunt Park in Virginia. It’s taken more than 20 hours for me to get here for today’s firearm-friendly Restore the Constitution rally, which is supposed to commence shortly.

Shaking up the school system Rhode Island education commissioner Deborah Gist’s take-charge style could make a winner of a state that often seems destined to fail. But critics say her free-market approach won’t work.

Moneybags Menino Inside Boston’s political back rooms, there is a growing suspicion that Mayor Thomas Menino is sitting on millions of dollars — tens of millions, maybe as much as $400 million — that could be used to save vital city services, such as, among many examples, four branch libraries and eight community centers that are slated to be shuttered.